Thrive Quiz Builder Review

By corrine | Quiz Product Reviews

Jul 02
Convert more with quizzes!

Thrive Quiz Builder Review

As a website celebrating the use of quizzes in internet marketing, I simply could not ignore one of the heavy hitters in the industry! Thrive Quiz Builder! So here is my review!

A lot of us in online marketing have been searching for better ways to get opt in leads and help our conversion rates increase. We have done hours of conversion testing and searching for the best online lead generation and high converting tools.

The online marketing quiz may be the answer for many. The engagement it can create can do wonders for a wide range of website based business'. This is why we have dedicated ourselves to hunting out the best quiz software we can find. And here we are today with another one.

Thrive has set themselves up as an incredibly popular provider of WordPress plugins for content creators, website owners etc. Specifically, those wanting to optimise their content for generating revenue. 

Before we get into the main Thrive Quiz Builder review, we intent to give a little background around why quizzes are so important to website owners and internet marketers. Don't worry, you can skip straight to what interests you below!

Before we jump into the full review, we have also done a full tutorial on how to build a quiz in Thrive Quiz Builder. You can check this article out over HERE. On top of this, I recently made an article with some real examples of quizzes I (quickly) made in Thrive Quiz Builder. Hopefully, along with this review, it will give you a fuller picture of what this tool is all about.

Why are quizzes important?

I did a pretty extensive article about this on SEOQuizMaster, but I will try to summarise here!

Creators of websites usually make their sites in order to get visitors to go there, right?

At this point it doesn't matter why this is, it could be because they want to make money or it could be they want to be a known authority in a niche. The point is, they want to grow a community. Often, after that, the marketing focused among us want people to opt in or be "converted" in some way. It could be through capturing their email or buying a product on your site. 

To keep people on any site, they need to feel the value and engagement this site offers. Quizzes can be the perfect tool here. Who doesn't want to test their knowledge about a particular subject or find out what type of person they are! You could even design a quiz to find out what a persons interests are and then use this information to market specific products to them. These quizzes will be fun for the user, whilst also offering crucial information to the site owner. Many people would also be willing to hand over their email during the quiz taking process.

In the social media based world we live in, quizzes are perfect material for people to share. And, if done well, these shares will lead to more people wanting to take that quiz. One viral quiz could result in a lot of exposure and fresh traffic for your site.

This is why quizzes have been rising in stature among the internet marketing community in recent years, and this is only set to increase.

Quizzes can improve bounce rate too!

If you have been in internet marketing circles for even a short time, you will have probably heard of bounce rate. In fact, you will hear a lot of people in these circles moaning about high bounce rates!

Wikipedia explains it as:

"Bounce rate (sometimes confused with exit rate) is an Internet marketing term used in web traffic analysis. It represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave ("bounce") rather than continuing to view other pages within the same site."


Naturally, bounce rate has become a key metric in internet marketing. Keeping people on a site means they are more likely to opt in or complete buy a product.

If you want to build a big community of visitors, it's far more efficient if you have a lower bounce rate. In order to improve this, you need to create a place that visitors feel a connection with. 

A place that they are self motivated to go back to and even recommend to friends.

These more committed visitors will also be more receptive to any attempt you make to convert them (in marketing speak).

The value and engagement talked about earlier will play a huge part in users building interest and trust in your site. If you run a make up based website and you have a quiz to help people determine the best type of make up for their features, for example. The people who take that quiz will be far more likely to trust your site and view it as an 'expert' on the subject.

Quizzes are not only about getting emails and making sales, they also build a valuable link between your site and the user. Most people will find that after implementing quizzes on a site, bounce rates will naturally start to go down.

What does Thrive Quiz builder offer?

As with most of their other products, it offers a user friendly experience. Something which is mostly drag and drop, simple for even for someone will lower computer skills. You no longer have to be a good designer or coder to add quizzes to your website.

The Main Features

The full quiz building process under one roof!

Thrive quiz builder gives you a framework that allows you to plan, build and publish your quizzes. All inside one piece of software. They even have wizards that will guide you through the process.

Planning made simple!

The planning process is the same as making a flow chart. This makes it easy to see the different routes your quiz takers might take. This simple approach makes it easy for you to tailor the quiz to give the exact experience you want. Again, arranging questions is as simple as dragging, dropping and connecting. Like Lego for adults!

Branching logic

When you make a quiz, you can change the questions that people are asked based on previous question they answered. You can also direct them to a different end products depending on the answers they gave. This gives you full flexibility for your quizzes, allowing you to get the most out of them.

A/B Testing

Thrive Quiz Builder has a full A/B testing capability built right into it's platform! Something a lot of much more expensive quiz builders don't yet offer!

An end result worth sharing

The templates and drag and drop nature, make it easy to make a high quality end of quiz social sharing badge. This will encourage your quiz takers to share these on social media and thus build interest from others in their circle.

Personalised experience for every customer

Thrive Quiz Builder allows you to make quizzes that will help find out the needs and desires of all your customers. It would be like having a one on one chat with each of them! You get key insights into your customers, allowing you to meet their needs better.

An example of this would be if you ran a cooking or recipe website. You could have a quiz to find out the customers preferences before they sign up for a newsletter. Then, you can send out specialised newsletters for people that are vegan, vegetarian or even those that say they like to barbecue regularly. Maybe this is not the perfect example, but you get the idea!

Training

Thrive Themes has excellent free training for their members, as part of of their Thrive University! This is mainly free courses with a few premium courses thrown in. A quick search brings up two courses dedicated to Thrive Quiz Builder. Their blog is also excellent, I would highly recommend following it for more details on how to use Thrive products!

Thrive Quiz Builder Review

OK, so Thrive Quiz Builder sounds good! Does it follow through?

From what I have written above, I am sure you will agree that this product sounds amazing in theory!

However, a lot of things that sound amazing aren't always amazing. For example, when you see a Ferrari kit car....maybe from a distance it looks great...then you get inside and find out it drives like a Ford Focus! (if you don't know what a Ford Focus is just picture whatever your first car was!!).

Lets get hands on!

In this part, I will try to show you how Thrive Quiz Builder actually feels to use!

The Install!

This product takes the form of a WordPress plugin, which has been made easy and simple to install. Thrive used to make you download and install a zip file of Thrive Quiz Builder and then activate it with a serial key. They recently streamlined this, as a lot of users were using their other web building tools and having to install multiple zip files of their various products! Now, all you have to do is download and install their product manager plugin, and then login to this on your site using your Thrive Themes credentials. Then Voila, you can download and install the quiz builder from there. I have more detailed instructions about this in my tutorial article.

Finally, go to the Thrive Dashboard section of your WordPress site to start using the builder.

Building a Quiz!

Once you are there, you will see a blank slate. Now it is time to start building some actual quizzes!

You can either start a quiz from scratch yourself (for when you know the product inside out and know exactly what you want!) or choose to go the route of a guided template. These templates will specifically set up the structure of your quiz for either list building or social shares, making it easy for even the most inexperienced users.

At this point, the quiz builder will guide you through each step of building your quiz. 

A part of this is choosing the design of your quiz. I was quite surprised to see that I only had four template offerings for the style of my quiz. I was really expecting more templates, and it makes me wonder if a lot of Thrive Quiz Builder users might end up with suspiciously similar looking end results. It's a similar story when it comes to making badges that are to be (hopefully) shared on social media when the user gets their results. These had only 6 choices for design style.

Thrive Quiz Builder Review

The way around that is to use the "start from scratch" feature to build your own designs. Yes, the thrive way of building the page look is very simple and drag and drop. However, this still takes more time than templates. I am sure most new users would agree with me, that more template theme choices wouldn't go a miss.

Moving along from this, I got stuck into the actual meat and potatoes of the question building part of the product. At this point I am, I have to say, rather impressed. As they advertised, it is indeed effortless to make quite complex quizzes. You make a question and that question can then be dragged around the screen to where you would like it in the quiz. You can interconnect the whole question with other questions, or you can connect individual question answers with other questions. 

It's quite hard to describe, but here's one I prepared earlier. Click the picture for a better view!

ThrivThrive Quiz Builder Review

Of course, this is a test quiz and not too much thought went into it. It did allow me to get a feel for the design and building process. I actually enjoyed putting the quiz together. It was easy to connect everything together and to look at the big picture of all those interconnections.

This implementation of branching logic is excellent, one of the best in the genre. Not only this, but Thrive Quiz Builder has full A/B testing features built right into their software. It is easy to make different results pages, and set up criteria to decide which page will be crowned the winner! Or you can simply manually select a winner based on the statistics collected! These are features you don't often see in even the most expensive competitors in the quiz building market! So well done Thrive for including it here!

I made an article which real quiz examples embedded into it, which you can view HERE. This will give you a better idea what the quizzes might look like as an end result. Just be aware that my design skills are literally zero!!

Without waffling too much, I can see this being a great and intuitive tool for building quizzes.

The lack of templates also fed into another little annoyance for me. From what I can see, there are no pre-defined quizzes. I understand they can't spend hundreds of hours making quizzes for every desire. However, I would have liked to see some kind of pre-made quizzes to get people started. They could look into popular genres (by making a quiz to their customers ha ha) and then build a handful of quizzes to go with that.

I would also like to see a feature to save a template for common answers. For example, I had to type in my Excellent to Poor scale several times as answers, and it already got rather annoying!

Embedding your new quiz?

When your quiz is done, you actually have to embed it into a page to test it out (unless I am really missing a trick here). It would be great to offer a feature to easily test and run through your quiz within the Thrive Quiz Builder plugin itself. A preview function, if you will!

The process of embedding is actually pretty simple. If you already use Thrive Architect, a page builder from the same company, you can simply add your quiz as an element in this product. However, sometimes newly created quizzes won't show up here. To remedy this, log out and into your website's admin panel again and you should see it present and correct! Annoying, but a small bug none the less!

Also, you could use the shortcode clearly provided for every quiz made in Thrive Quiz Builder, and insert into whatever WordPress page you are creating. 

The only other slight annoyance I found here is when embedding quizzes that use splash pages. A slash page is supposed to be an advert style page for your quiz that will encourage more interest in said quiz. I thought this would be a smaller and sleeker element that could be squeezed onto my website pages with less initial footprint. However, the problem is the splash page leaves a massive gap under it anyway. In my opinion, this lessens the effect of these splash pages, and Thrive Themes should really looking into getting rid of this!

How about the quiz results?

The plugin gives you a results page that details your quizzes and their various results, as you can see below.

Thrive Quiz Builder Review

This seems to be robust and provide all the information you would need, such as quiz users, flow, and quiz completions. I would need to fully build out and use several quizzes to fully comment on this part of the software. If anyone out there has done this, feel free to leave your views in the comment section below.

Any other note worthy features?

For me, the other main feature to talk about is the ability to integrate Thrive Quiz Builder with a mail auto-responder. This means that you can send any collected emails through to this service. Also, whilst making your quiz questions you have the ability to add tags to your answers. For example, any question answers that show that someone is interested in hiking, you could tag all those answers accordingly. Those tags are then associated with the user and extracted to your auto-responder too. This gives you another way you can segment and market to your quiz takers. Please be aware though, that for all of this to work, you also need an opt-in gate within your quiz structure to collect all of this information in the first place!

In terms of auto responders, the ones that can be integrated directly into Thrive Quiz Builder at the time of writing are quite extensive. These include some of the popular products such as Active Campaign, Mail Chimp and Convert Kit. When designing your opt-in gate, it is a simple process to add one of these integrated services.

Is Thrive Quiz Builder Abandon-ware?

Some of you may be wondering whether Thrive have continued to update this product, especially as they are a growing company with many other products under their umbrella to maintain. 

What I would say is that they seem happy with the basic functionality of this product, and I wouldn't expect any major changes anytime soon. However, they are still offering regular tweaks to show us they are still paying attention to the product. For example, they recently added the ability to quickly clone an already made quiz. If you don't believe me, go check out their change logs HERE.

Also, their customer support is top notch. I recently had a question, and literally got a response minutes after my support ticket went live. So, in my opinion, Thrive Themes are a company that want to do business the right way! They want to be a force to be reckoned with in this space long term. And to do this, they need to keep their customer base happy!

What's the price?

This is the area where I can start forgiving some of those earlier shortcomings I talked about.

This product costs only $$99 for a one website licence, bundled with one year of support. 

This will get even cheaper if you buy 5 website licences at the same time. 

The last pricing option (and the one Thrive seem to want you to take), is to pay $299/year for the full suite of all Thrive products past, present and future. A Thrive Themes membership, if you will! This can be used on up to 5 of your sites! If that amount is too small for you, you can upgrade to an agency plan for $49 a month. That would give you access to 50 fully fledged WordPress plugins from Thrive Themes.

The Final Verdict

When the other major players in the online quiz building niche are charging considerably more, this makes Thrive Quiz builder look like an exceptional option.

It is perfect for someone that is on a budget or is confident to design their own templates. Also, if you want the option to add quizzes to your website, but don't plan on it being a major or regular thing. This product is perfect.

Personally, for me, I own and love the full suite of Thrive Themes products and use them daily. I now build all of my websites around their products. This means that I always have access to making quizzes for my sites, even if it is not a regular thing. And I still pay the same $25 a month fee. I bet there are a lot of Thrive Themes subscribers that have never even touched this quiz builder! To me, that is a crying shame!

For the price, I would HIGHLY recommend Thrive Quiz Builder. Answer tagging, excellent visual logic branching and full A/B testing at this price point? There are many more expensive competitors that could learn a thing or two here!

The few dents in the armour regarding pre-made template content and minor bugs, does leave the door ajar for the competition. Maybe someone else can come along and offer a similar quiz designer with a wider range of design template choices! If they can match or beat this already great price point, it would certainly make things interesting. It would remain to be seen whether they would be able to design such a simple and intuitive quiz builder as this one though!

The Final Verdict

Thank you for reading our Thrive Quiz Builder Review! This is the summing up part!! Thrive Quiz Builder is an excellent product at an excellent price, backed up by awesome support and training! What more do you want??

  • Features
  • Content
  • usability
  • Price

This is a high point for Thrive Quiz Builder. They have thought up a set of wide ranging features, giving the ability to design, create, deliver and manager online quizzes. At his price point, it is hard to beat. They even have full A/B testing!

Not perfect, but pretty much the best quiz builder focused on online marketing for the price.They have left the door somewhat a jar for the competition though! If someone makes a more content rich product at a similar price, it could steal their thunder.

Are you a quiz funnel expert? Have you seen your opt in leads increased by online marketing quizzes? I would love to hear your experiences in the comment section below!

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